I’m not a huge fan of simulators, as my personality needs to be engaged with stories and driven by content. Building up a life, creating environments, and maintaining a life balance in a game are just not my cup of tea. This is why I don’t play the sims because it’s a bit too much responsibility when I’m living a life that already contains too much. I don’t want to do chores when I should be relaxing.
Simple enough reasoning and no doubt solid.
Well, I’m going to have to re-evaluate my genre choices now.
Thanks to Gaming Minds Studios and Kalypso’s Tortuga: A Pirate’s Tale, I may have just found out that my true sim calling is pirate related. With an extensive campaign, a shit ton of side quests, and a backend system that allows you to keep your crew happy, build out your ship, and conquer lands, a pirate’s life is indeed for me.
Let’s get going, matey!
Becoming a pirate
Starting out your life on the high seas can be jarring in Tortuga: A Pirate’s Tale. Truthfully, the game has an extensive tutorial and a fair amount of content to memorize and keep close to you when you’re playing. The first 20-30 minutes of the game are getting used to every aspect of gameplay. And the gameplay is pretty spread out. You will feel overwhelmed with what you need to think about, but the game does a good job of explaining each part. It does it in a whimsical way where you’re talked through it all by a first mate, who makes some good chatter to ease you into the pieces.
Let’s talk about those pieces that make up this game.
Making port – Finding and making port around Florida, Cuba, Texas, and other fancy and free places is key to not only finding your bearings around the map, which features a HUD that can be tough to read but also knowing which places feature what upgrades and such. And believe me, there are a lot of ports to explore. You’ll have plenty of choices and feel safe knowing that if your ship is damaged or your need to feed your crew, then there is a port waiting for you close by. These ports also feature governors, who you can talk to and get favors/quests from to progress in the game. The ports also contain bars to hire crew, randomly meet people and take on side quests, and other aspects of a pirate simulator that you would assume should be in it. These stops afford you pretty much every type of element that affects the gameplay directly. It’s impressive the number of different tales and offers you run into with all of these ports. They are the heart and soul of this game and the stops that keep the gaming engaging and interesting. They’re also good breaks from the action, which you will have plenty of when you start building your pirate life out.
The only downer of the ports is that sometimes they can be repetitive with tasks and side quests. For example, you will find people at bars that will ask you to take them somewhere for reasons, such as love. You will find these types of people featured in a lot of ports. The rewards might be slightly different, but the purpose is the same. The good part about tasks is that there are a lot of them, but they are finite in number. You’ll find that out quickly when you see the lists. In hindsight, It isn’t terrible considering the number of ports you can visit, but eventually, you will just ignore repeat requests.
Battling other ships – When you’re not acquiring materials and people, you’re going out to battle on the high seas. This is the aspect of the game that contains nearly all the action of the gameplay. You battle against enemy ships on a hexagon-driven board that features multiple weaponry usage (cannonballs, chains, etc.), and there are some cool weapons you can acquire, and the battling process is a turn-based strategic battler that you must be deadly precise with your decision-making in order to succeed. The action is driven by moving your ship in a particular spot to wear down other ships and their defenses, and potentially boarding ships and taking out the crew manually (which is just percentage chances – dice role – and not actual action). The spaces you traverse range from light gray, mid-gray, and solid white. The latter means you have the best chance at the damage, but that all depends on the positioning of the enemy ship, which basically has some armor on the sides before you can do real damage.
This part of the game is cognitively engaging and puts you in the mood to go start some fights. The rewards you gain from this part of Tortuga make it well worth the constant revisit. Sometimes you get a large amount of coin, sometimes you get a new captain, and sometimes you get to get rid of the old captain after a fight. There is plenty of motivation to keep revisiting the action, even when it seems like you’re fighting the same fight. This part of the game doesn’t disappoint whatsoever.
Taking care of your crew – This aspect of the game is comparable to carrying around a flour bag baby in high school. Do they still do that? I don’t know but just go with it. While the crew is an absolute necessity for success in Tortuga, you must take care of every aspect of them, including recruiting more when the old ones die. Other than death in the game, crew happiness is an important part of success in and for the crew’s survival, as well as yours. You don’t want a mutiny on your hands. Anyway, to keep them happy you have to cut them in on the profits and feed them. Money and food, it makes everyone happy. True story. To do either of these, you must visit ports to get material and divide up the booty you get from completing quests and taking down ships. This aspect of the game breaks up the fighting and exploring, which is fine. It’s a buffer that makes sure that you don’t quickly become bored with simplistic gameplay. It works within the confines of the story as well, so it’s not bad.
Upgrading your ships and captains, as well as acquiring new tasks – Oh, this is a large chunk of complication here. The easy piece in this trio is upgrading your ships. You can upgrade your ships at ports, from sails to rudder, and improve the quality of it on the sea. This might mean you’re faster, built tougher, or you have a cool skeleton wrap on the outside. All these upgrades cost money, which is simple enough. To get the money, you complete favors and quests, or just simply hunt random ships down, and you can slowly upgrade what you have. This system is straightforward, but it took me a while to understand why I couldn’t upgrade certain parts of certain ships even though I had the money for it. There are times when certain ships cannot be upgraded with parts because they don’t feature them. I know, I’m real Sherlock, right? Anyway, making your ships into something special is fun, especially when you see results from your upgrading actions.
Now, every nice ship must have a good captain. You can hire multiple captains to run multiple ships you may ‘acquire’ while sailing. If you board an enemy’s ship and conquer it, then you can take their ship and either use it or sell it. Should you do the former, then you need a captain. You can run into them during fights or you can acquire them at pirate pubs at ports. Anyway, once you have them on your crew, you must keep them happy and upgrade them. To do this, you have to split the booty with your crew and captains, which produces experience points for the caps. These points can unlock slots where you can apply buffs to each captain and slowly upgrade the buffs the same way. The happier you keep them, the better results you get on the seas. If you make them angry enough, they bail. It’s so much fun to balance this aspect and it’s a finer detail that should get love.
To keep everyone on your crew happy, swabs and captains, you must assign tasks and adventures. These would be micro-goals outside of quests, which might be something like taking down an X number of ships or spreading your gold amongst your crew. They’re simple tasks but they equal out to greater rewards, mainly a happy crew. And yes, there is a gauge on crew happiness. Don’t make them unhappy. You won’t like that at all.
It’s fascinating how complicated this game gets in these three areas but it works to keep you on your toes. If you enjoy juggling, then you’re in the right place.
Allegiances and consequences – Gaining or losing social capital on the high seas mean that you could find yourself in a situation with the international community. The game does a decent job of allowing you to gradually hunt down certain international ships and create animosity with said country. For example, you might run into a governor in a port that secretly request you to hunt down British ships. If you do so, and are successful at it, then you might get some sweet coin and better responses from the governor, but you also might get bad responses from British ships that will actively hunt you. Like everything in this game, it appears to be a balance of who you should trust and what consequences might come out of that at the end of the day. I found this part of the game to be intellectually stimulating, but also stressful when trying to make the ‘right’ choice.
All the above are the main parts of Tortuga: A Pirate’s Tale’s gameplay design. Together they do a wonderful song and dance, but getting into that party before you even start grooving could be a bit much for some gamers. And that isn’t anything unusual for this genre. Simulators tend to be overwhelming when it comes to learning all the tools. When I played The Sims 1-4 over a very spaced-out period of time, it was like going through a bunch of hoops each time trying to pick up on the new way to play. Tortuga: A Pirate’s Tale is no different in how it introduces itself.
There are so many pieces and parts to learn in Tortuga that you will feel frustrated and want to quit before you even truly begin. Now, believe me when I say that I was at that point when I first started this review. Learning how fighting with ships works, the alliances work, and all the ins and outs of keeping your crew happy was a lot for a ‘fun’ gaming experience. And by ‘fun’ I mean slightly torturous. Thankfully, I made it through the introduction of the game, and I waited for everything to smooth over and calm the game. Once it all did, I started truly learning the pieces and parts as I ran into them. And this isn’t any fault of Game Minds Studios, as they wanted to make a deep pirate simulator experience, so there were going to be a lot of moving parts to get there. What came out of this was a wonderful game that I’ll be revisiting from time to time. I can’t say too much about simulators, but this one is different for me. It’s just fun and oddly relaxing.
Hiccups
As much as I enjoy Tortuga, the game isn’t completely perfect. The controls can be finicky at times, just moving the ship or avoiding enemy ships can be a little taxing. Moving quickly away from something or trying to navigate around coral instead of running into it has to be precise, or otherwise, you run into problems big time, so as being caught by an enemy when you need to get repairs on your ship done. That’s never good timing.
Now, the biggest issue I had with this game is the camera during sea battles. When you’re not battling it out with other ships, you can zoom out and sail around in an almost comfortable isometric top-down view. That changes when you enter a battle.
When you are battling ships, you can zoom out, but every single time a ship moves around the hexagon board, the camera zooms in. And sometimes it can also swing around because it zoomed in too much. That can be frustrating and confusing, as sometimes your friendly ships look like enemy ships because the camera went wonky in its direction to correct itself. I know this problem can be corrected, so I hope they do fix it. Players should be able to zoom out and stay out during battles.
Outside of these hiccups, the game is smooth sailing (pun intended). The above is by no means game breakers, but that camera during battles must get fixed. It truly is annoying.
On that note, let’s wrap this up.
Conclusion
Tortuga: A Pirate’s Tale from Gaming Minds Studios and Kalypso is a solid pirate simulator. It gives you a good dose of action and a large dose of complicated backend elements to keep your intellectual simulator side satisfied. While there are some hiccups with the repetitiveness of tasks and a camera with a mind of its own during battles, the game is still entertaining and fulfilling.
